Artificial meat and the future of protein production

ALAN KOHLER

OCTOBER 12, 2019

The Australian

I had one of the new Rebel Whoppers at Hungry Jack’s for lunch this week. It was pretty good. The patty looked like meat and even tasted a bit like meat, and at the end of a long night you might even think it was meat.

The Rebel Whopper is the outcome of CSIRO’s plant-based meat research, and represents Australia’s answer to one of the hottest American IPOs of 2019, Beyond Meat, as well as the other company that everyone thought was going to float, but to general disappointment, didn’t yet — ­Impossible Foods.

Australia’s first “beyond meat” company is v2food Pty Ltd, part-owned by CSIRO and Jack Cowin, owner of Hungry Jack’s. The company is currently in the middle of a series-A round to raise money for a factory, and is attracting plenty of interest from venture capital. An ASX IPO, one imagines, is on the horizon.

The coming together of Cowin and CSIRO, and their hiring of Nick Hazell, an experienced food R&D expert who has worked for Pepsi, Masterfoods and Mars, has fast-tracked what would normally take years, and did take years in the case of Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods.

They started working on the recipe a year ago, incorporated the company in January this year and launched the product in Hungry Jack’s stores this week. They have sold 20,000 in two days.

Interesting branding by the way, calling it “Rebel” and not a vegie burger. “Made from plants”, says the sign. “100 per cent Whopper, 0 per cent beef.” The recipe, of course, is a deep secret.

Why am I writing a column about a vegetable burger? Because plant-based “meat” is a megatrend that is going to have a huge impact on the global food and agricultural industries.

Is it meat? Well yes and no, and this is already becoming the ­subject of a labelling fight with the livestock industry, as with the labelling of soy and almond liquids as milk. (They’ll lose, I think: meat and milk are generic terms, and don’t necessarily imply that animals were responsible for its production. It will be generally agreed in the end, I think, that meat does not have to come from animals.)

In essence the stuff is a more ­efficient way to grow protein. The reason all these companies are going for beef first is that cattle are the least cost-effective way of producing protein. Pork and lamb are next and chicken and fish are relatively efficient, so it will be a while before they suffer the indignity of a plant-based alternative.

This is not what is called cell-based meat. That is actual meat — identical in every way to the real thing — based on a small biopsy of tissue taken from a living animal and then grown in the laboratory using plant proteins into a steak or something through fermentation. There is plenty of research and money going into this, and there seems little doubt that it will end up being commercialised, but at the moment it’s too expensive to be a viable alternative to animal-grown meat in a burger.

The Rebel Whopper, on the other hand, is made from plants using a recipe and is the same price as the normal Whopper ($6.70 or $7.50 with cheese, which is what I had), although I suspect that’s well below cost since the patty is currently made at CSIRO’s small food innovation centre at Werribee near Melbourne, until the proper factory is built.

Nick Hazell says the output of the factory will be sold to other burger chains, including (he hopes) McDonald’s, as well as ­exported, which he says will be where the big opportunities lie.

“We’re not trying to destroy the meat industry, we’re working with them. We think the future is producing meat from plants as well as animals.”

That isn’t everyone’s view. A US-based think tank called ­RethinkX put out a study last month that concluded: “By 2030, the number of cows in the US will have fallen by 50 per cent and the cattle farming industry will be all but bankrupt. All other livestock industries will suffer a similar fate, while the knock-on effects for crop farmers and businesses throughout the value chain will be severe.”

That’s because, according to this report, the “protein disruption” will mean proteins will become five times cheaper by 2030 and 10 times cheaper by 2035 than existing animal proteins, before ultimately approaching the cost of sugar.

“Product after product that we extract from the cow will be replaced by superior, cheaper alternatives, triggering a death spiral of increasing prices, decreasing demand, and reversing economies of scale for the cattle industry, which will collapse long before we see modern technologies produce the perfect, cellular steak.”

The report asserts that the ­industrial livestock production model has all but reached its limits in terms of scale, reach, and efficiency, and although the precision fermentation and cellular steak it’s referring to is not what v2food or Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods are doing (yet), it does point out, correctly, that modern food is already starting to disrupt the ground meat (mince) market.

“ … Once cost parity is reached, we believe in 2021-23, adoption will tip and accelerate exponentially.”

The other reason that this disruption is happening and is likely to accelerate, apart from cost and the fact that more people are choosing to be vegetarians because they don’t like industrial farming of animals, is climate change: the livestock industry is one of the biggest greenhouse gas emitters, and the Greta Thunberg-inspired movement to do more about global warming is also leading to a reduction in meat consumption.

And there’s a fourth, even more compelling reason. Nick Hazell believes it’s all about the vast quantity of protein that’s going to be needed to feed the world, as more people join the middle class.

“We’re going to need another global meat industry, the same size as the one we’ve got. It’s simply going to be impossible to grow the amount of meat required — plant-based meat is going to be a trillion-dollar industry.”